Correctional facilities have traditionally recorded telephone conversations of its inmates. Such recordings may be conducted pursuant to a variety of rules that range anywhere from only recording conversations of calls made to specific telephone numbers, calls made by specific inmates or made using specific telephones, to recording every single call. Recording of inmate telephone calls is well known. Such recordings may be monitored by appropriate authorities to detect information regarding the security of facilities, continuing or past criminal activity, etc. Monitoring of the recordings may be performed manually (e.g., by a person listening to the recording) and/or may be performed robotically (or autonomously) by, for example, computer processing logic for analyzing the recordings for certain keywords, etc. In some instances, the recordings may be stored for later use, such as for later investigations, later used as evidence in a court of law, etc.
Various techniques for recording telephone calls are known. Examples of known recording techniques include those described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,647,096 titled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR REMOTELY CONTROLLING AUTOMATED CALL PLACEMENT CALL MONITORING FUNCTIONS,” U.S. Pat. No. 6,665,376 titled “SELECTIVELY ACTIVATED INTEGRATED REAL-TIME RECORDING OF TELEPHONE CONVERSATIONS WITH AUTOMATED DOCUMENTATION OF CONSENT TO CALL RECORDING,” and those described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,058,163, titled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR EX POST FACTO PRESERVING A RECORDED CONVERSATION”, the disclosures of which are hereby incorporated herein by reference. Traditionally, telephone calls have been recorded using a “single-channel” recording. Such a single-channel recording records audio of the call from a single perspective (or “point of view”). As examples, the recording may be from the perspective of the person originating the call (i.e., the audio heard by the originating party), from the perspective of the called party (i.e., the audio heard by the called party), or from the perspective of an eavesdropper to the call (i.e., the audio heard by an eavesdropper). In a case in which an interactive voice response (IVR) system is involved in the call, the call may be recorded from the perspective of such IVR.
In some recording systems, the perspective of the recording may change during a call. For instance, when a call is initiated, the recording system may start recording of the call from the perspective of the originating party. Then, the recording system may change its perspective to that of an IVR system that is managing the call (e.g., the IVR may interact with the originating party and/or called party to establish a payment arrangement for the call, etc.). For example, when the call is first connected to the called party an IVR may interact with the called party to inform the party of the inmate who originated the call and ask the called party whether he agrees to accept charges for the call. Audio from the IVR may be provided solely to the called party (e.g., the originating party may be temporarily switched away from the call so as not to hear the called party or the IVR). Thus, when recording from the IVR's perspective, the audio from the called party is recorded, but any audio occurring on the originating party's side of the call during this portion of the call is not recorded. Thereafter, the originating party and called party may be connected together and the recording system may record an overall perspective of the audio being communicated during the call (e.g., recording from the perspective of an eavesdropper to the call). However, the traditional recording systems use a single-channel recording, and thus for any given point during the call, a recording captures audio from a single perspective. Thus, while the perspective may change during the course of a call, at any given point of a call, the recording captures audio from only a single perspective.